Cornell & Diehl Americana Tobacco Review
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Kyle Weiss - Jul 14, 2021
- 5 min read
Hot, hot, hot. The American West started summer with a hellish vengeance before summer even officially began. It’s made doing everything difficult. Places like the Northwestern states were seeing temperatures in some places that rivaled that of Phoenix, AZ—except they actually had humidity. Sagebrush Country where I call home wasn’t as bad off, we’re used to seeing temperatures in the triple digits—well, perhaps a month from now. “But it’s a dry heat…”…but it’s also the Great Basin’s mile-high elevation that makes the sun feel even more brutal. It’s going to be a rough summer.
That hasn’t gotten me down. After switching apartments (yes, in the blazing heat) I have had to adapt my piping accordingly. The new place doesn’t allow smoking on the premises, and will charge me $50 for each incident I am caught. Unfazed, I have gone back to doing something I haven’t in a while: become a piping hobo. I go where I want, friendly outdoor spaces or places where tobacco is okay, and ask for forgiveness rather than permission if it’s frowned upon. Such is the life of today. My focus this month will be on C&D’s “Americana,” a Latakia-light mixture that is predominantly Virginia and Burley. It invited me to ”take a stroll down memory lane,” but usually that takes the tone of a few drinks and random flashes of when I was a child and enjoyed Schwarzenegger’s cringingly fine performance in Total Recall. Regardless, Americana is a nod to classic tobacco, but relevant for those of us here in the future-world of 2021. Join me as I take on what could be called an “American-English.”
The tin is labeled in a contrasting red-white-blue theme, making it appropriate and lightly patriotic for the month of July. Upon opening the tin, besides a raisin-like typical tobacco smell, there’s not much to it. It isn’t unpleasant, it just smells like…well, tobacco. Any Latakia that is included is in such scant amounts, they’re barely noticeable to the nose before packing and lighting. Speaking of which, the loose and fluffy ribbons are of appropriate moisture content, easy to see the trifecta of tobaccos featured; they’re easy to load, pack and tamp to the right draw.
First puffs are an easy light, and immediately it’s an all-Virginia show, or so it seems. On the very back end, there’s a little bit of Latakia that flirts briefly with the experience, followed by very faint classic Burley nuttiness. This is a straightforward tobacco blend, all-savory and unapologetic in its declaration of being tobacco, nothing more and nothing less. Two things were hindering my experiences, the heat for one, as I mostly smoked outside, and the other issue was that I kept choosing pipes that smoke hot. Half a dozen times I dusted off a few briars I hadn’t spent time with lately, and now I know why. It’s always a shame when some of the pipes you love are only good for looking at. It was steady-as-she-goes smoking, and difficult at times to get lost in the tobacco.
Midway through bowls I began noticing a very decidedly “cigarette” quality to the smoke. I could smell it as I retrohaled, as I sensed an increase in a papery, road-tar kind of taste hitting the roof of my mouth and back of my throat. It reminded me a little of Sam Gawith’s Skiff Mixture, but without any of the buttery depth. Surprisingly, there was a consistent bit of bite from what I assume is the Burley. The nuttiness I got in the beginning was being overwhelmed by the cigarette attitude of the mixture, and with the heat, I found myself putting the pipe down more often than not just to take a break. This helped matters a little, but the brittle, acrid smoke wasn’t doing me many favors, unfortunately.
The later-to-end points of my bowls of Americana ended up getting even more bitey. This was with cool-smoking pipes as well as some of the supermodel briars (termed as such because they’re pretty to look at, smokin’ hot, and don’t have much going for them otherwise). This was purely chemistry, and for some reason my chemistry didn’t care for whatever was going on in this mixture. It was solved in part by smoking much smaller bowls. I suspect it’s the post-harvest cure that was used with the Burley, as I’ve had problems like this in the past. The good news is toward the end of the bowl, the cigarette nature calms down, likely from the heat and tamping, meshes the other flavors. The final 20 minutes of each time I sat down with Americana was the best for me, and it was a bit difficult to justify getting there just for that. To its credit, at no time did it get ashy or bitter, and performance qualities were great (despite my choice of pipes a few times).
It’s always a fine line being critical of a tobacco, because I do this for enjoyment, but I also do this for a living. Such cop-outs like “your mileage may vary” I don’t have the luxury of using. To me, this wasn’t a slam-dunk tobacco, and it certainly wasn’t my kind of tobacco. To be fair, it is a quality mixture. On an optimistic note, this could be a great tobacco to let sit for half a decade to age-up a bit, and it might turn into a forgotten sleeper. The American-English mixture trend always has a decidedly low level of Latakia, so it’d probably vanish completely in that time. I’ve had Burley-heavy mixtures from many manufacturers, and if there’s one thing I’ve noticed is that Burley is a cured superstar or it’s just basic tobacco. At times it can get downright unruly. In the right hands, it can do beautiful things Virginia simply cannot, otherwise it gets to play host for things like sauces and flavors for aromatics: and there’s a reason for that. This is the first time C&D has surprised me by not making me a fan of their Burley in this instance. Someone will enjoy this tobacco, it just didn’t happen to be me.
Americana is a take on a classic I’d agree, and perhaps it takes 50 years of smoking experience to appreciate something like this. If anything, I’d call this a great “cantankerous old man’s tobacco.” I have some decades before I claim something akin to that title. For now, I’m content with grumbling at the sun and hiding in the air conditioning.
Written by Kyle Weiss
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Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 636. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Barry Kane. Barry started smoking a pipe in 1961 when he was 14-years old. Back then it seemed like everybody smoked, and you could buy pipes and tobacco just about anywhere. Barry is a true old-school pipe smoker, sticking to just one blend. See if you can guess which one before listening. At the top of the show Brian will give his take on Scandinavian Tobacco Group’s purchase of Mac Baren and Sutliff Tobacco and their announcement that they will be shut down.
There’s a pipe in my collection that I cannot bring myself to smoke, though I’ve had it for more years than I care to recall. It’s old, or shall I say, well experienced; that experience, that oldness came to it long before it was in my possession. The pipe is an old Comoy’s Grand Slam from the 1940s. The shape (#93), a slightly canted, stack billiard (sometimes referred to as a Belgian) is right up my alley, and it’s a beautiful example of it. It came to me with some wear and tear; nothing unusual for an old pipe, but more the signs of one that has been well loved, smoked a lot, treated as a favorite tool, cherished, in a sense, by frequent use. It’s the pipe equivalent of a vintage car that’s been driven a lot, enjoyed fully and maintained adequately, rather than one kept in a spotless garage, dusted and detailed weekly, brought out only for leisurely Sunday drives, or to be ogled behind the ropes at the next Concours d’Elegance. When it arrived, those uncounted years ago, it wanted a little restoration. Nothing dramatic needed to be done to it, but the stem was oxidized, the finish a little dingy. The cake was even and fairly thin, and the airway was relatively clean, both signs that its previous owner cared for it, but the bowl’s surface was a little drab and dull. It took little effort to reveal its beauty, to show the lovely contrasted stain and interesting grain beneath the old wax. I often think I should do before and after photos of pipes that I work on, but those thoughts always come after the work’s been done. This one would have been a great illustration of how years of handling that can sometimes make a pipe more beautiful, can other times make it just look grungy. Once I’d cleaned up the externals, it was time to address the inside bits. I approach this a little bassackwards, I realize. It would be more sensible to take care of the inside before addressing the outside, but it’s how I roll. If an old pipe isn’t pretty to look at, it’s unlikely that I’ll care much about it, and cleaning is usually the hardest part, or at least the most boring part of any restoration for me. Alcohol and pipe cleaners. Lots of pipe cleaners. That’s why I leave it for last. Sometimes, I’ll even give a pipe a test smoke before a deep cleaning, just for a point of reference. I gave it a sniff to get an idea of what I was up against, and it stopped me cold. There in that bowl was an aroma that I had not smelled in decades. My head was instantly filled with memories of being in the back room of a fabled Berkeley tobacconist’s shop where I stumbled upon a few jars of long discontinued blends. One of them, a blend called Forty and Eight, had the most engaging and unusual scent of any tobacco I’d stuck my schnoz into. It was sweet, but not in a candy store way. There were none of the usual vanilla, cherry, berry or anise notes of typical aromatics, nothing that could be compared to aftershave or deodorant soap, but something almost musky, a little earthy, something exotic. The shop’s owner couldn’t tell me what was in it, how, or where it had been produced. The old blend had been retired before he’d bought the place. The printed catalogue gave no clues, either, other than being overprinted with the word “DISCONTINUED” in bold, rubber-stamp type. (And, I don’t recall it as being “highly aromatic” as the description indicates.) There was still quite a bit in the jar. Being, at that point, an intrepid explorer of all kinds of tobaccos, whether I thought I’d like them or not, I had to give it a try. It was burly based, but also comprised a good measure of virginia leaf, and maybe some other varieties; I didn’t have enough experience at the time to really pick it apart. But, that aroma was unlike anything I’d experienced before or since. It was something now completely lost to time. Until it wasn’t. Memories are powerful things, and there is no sense more tightly bound to memory than our sense of smell. One whiff was all it took to carry me back in time, conjuring a vivid recollection of something long submerged in the inky depths of a subconscious mind. Look, I know as well as anyone that pipes are meant to be smoked, and that many feel it almost sacrilegious to have a pipe and not set it to its intended task. In this case, I simply can’t. I won’t. Ever. Rationally, I am fairly certain this pipe would probably be a great smoke. It was too well loved by its previous caretaker to be anything less than that. My choice not to smoke it is an emotional one, not something rational. Of the thousands of pipes that have passed through my hands over the years, this is the only one to create such a singular and vivid, almost Proustian recollection of temps perdu, of lost time. It revivified a long dormant memory that is mine, and mine alone, and that’s enough. I keep it in a drawer with other old English pipes. In some ways, it’s nothing special, just a nice old pipe. I don’t lavish it with any particular care that arguably befits the hidden treasure that it holds. It’s not in a special box, or displayed preciously in a glass cabinet. Every once in a while, I take it out, point my nose bowlwards, and every time, those memories return just as powerfully as they did the first time. I have no idea how long it’s been since its last owner smoked it, but in the years I’ve had it, there seems to have been very little degradation of the aroma, and that’s […]
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 635. Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with James Ravenwood. James is the boutique tobacco blender of Ravenwood Blends. His blending started out as a fun hobby, and he now has professionally packaged commercially available products with some great tin art. Part of his interest in pipe smoking goes back to fond memories of a retired Navy Veteran that lived on his street while he was growing up that would sit in his driveway smoking a pipe all day. Later, in 2011 he began smoking pipes and soon after started experimenting with mixing different tobaccos. His other hobby, that he has been doing for 30 years, is photography. He takes wonderful photos of outdoor spaces, and still life pictures of pipes and tobacco. You can see them on his Instagram @thebriarfellowship. At the top of the show we’ll have an Ask the Pipemaker segment with renowned pipe artisan Jeff Gracik.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 634! Our featured interview on tonight’s show is with Warren Ertle. Warren is an extremely accomplished musician with a PhD in music. He started early as a percussionist in sixth grade. Later his grandmother got him a cheap Casio keyboard which he taught himself to play. He started playing in blues bands in high school, and has been a pianist with jazz big bands for years. Even though he was already a professional musician, he took his first real piano lesson when he enrolled in college with his studies in classical music. He is of course a pipe smoker. At the top of the show we will have an Ask the Tobacco Blender segment with Jeremy Reeves. Jeremy is the Head Blender at Cornell & Diehl, which is one of the most popular boutique pipe tobacco companies in the USA.
Soon now, supposedly, our neighborhoods will shift from grinning pumpkins, skeletons in various assortments, and zombies dashing about to pretty reindeer, angels, and flashing lights illuminating homes with sparkling stars and laughing, scurrying Santas. But, lest we forget, there is the turkey season, fancy pie aromas wafting from kitchens, and a national pardon of a big Tom Turkey. Remember, now, that only one of these holiday personalities is a pipe smoker. And that is the hefty, bearded fellow in a bright red suit sitting in a sleigh with a herd of deer hitched up and ready to streak across the globe, bringing tidings of joy and many presents. Ok, the scene is set for the next couple of months, right? So, before we get too far off the beaten path, let’s just take a deep breath of fresh autumn air, shall we? Ahh. That’s better, isn’t it? What’s got the Pundit in a snit is not all the Halloween spooks who came a-jostling for candy. Or the wild turkeys gobbling in the backwoods or all the fuss and feathers over the big one—Christmas. No, it is that we might need to take note of all the little things that mean so much to us. Like a good sunrise (seriously, Pundit has not gone all Pollyanna.) Mayhaps we need to appreciate more of what we have than what we have not. Or something like that. Like, a good pipe in the morning with coffee as the dawn brings us coolish weather now that we have flipped the calendar to autumn. But it also brings beautiful leaves that have become a spectacle of technicolor in the wind. It is the little things. The rereading of an enjoyable book and finding something you did not see or learn in the first go-round. Or a stunning phrase you commit to memory with the re-read, while smoking that favorite pipe. And you notice a superior puff that just seems to be different. It’s in the air and the seasons of meaningful little things. It’s aromatic! Or perhaps it is that sense of satisfaction knowing and appreciating you made it to another day. With the world in a kind of rinse-and-repeat history, reminiscent of a Shakespearean play, it is perhaps a good moment to remember some of Pipedom’s philosophers whose cogent thoughts brought light to clear a path in the mists of confusion and confounding opinions. Ok. No gloom and doom. Just some down-home thoughts. Think of times in the past when history was running off the rails. It took our pipe-smoking thinkers (the mind workers of the world) to speak of better pathways to more light. Think for a moment, with a pipe in hand, these wizards of the world and word: Albert Einstein, J. R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edwin Hubble, Bertrand Russell, C. S. Lewis, and Jean-Paul Sartre. All learned and enlightened. They offered wisdom instead of storms of meaningless roads to nowhere. All while smoking their pipes! 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A fact is not a truth until you love it—Shelby Foote. A parting thought: It is said that famed Southern author William Faulkner carried a packed pipe in a coat pocket wherever he went. That’s one effective way to deal with workday conflicts and confusion. A calm and objective judgment in our everyday human affairs, as the quantum man said.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 633. Our featured guest tonight is Jon David Cole. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and the accompanying online store. We’ll have JD and Brian talking about what’s new at the store and in the business in general. At the top of the show, Brian will discuss tobacco growing, what happens to the leaf, and provide updated information on where tobacco is being gown today. Tobacco production originated in the United States and we were once the #1 producer. It’s quite different now.
Thanks for the review. Sounds like something I’d enjoy but don’t need to rush too try. But the reason I have to leave a comment is…. ” enjoyed [I]Schwarzenegger’s cringingly fine performance in Total Recall.[/I] ” what a beautiful, precise, and clever use of language.
Hey (another)bob—thank you. That movie scarred me as a child and I’m all the better for it!
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This review reminds me of way too many smokes in the super-heated air of summer. I cringed with every word. Love your writing though, Kyle. It’s like being there.